


Acts of Resistance (Don't Own Me Remix)

by navaan



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Angst, Emotional/Psychological Abuse implied, F/M, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, POV Female Character, Pre-Canon, Remix, Resistance, Victors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-25 17:34:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12040821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: Johanna and Finnick deal with their life as victors in their own ways.





	Acts of Resistance (Don't Own Me Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mihrsuri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mihrsuri/gifts).
  * Inspired by [And don't you know, you never had me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6248368) by [mihrsuri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mihrsuri/pseuds/mihrsuri). 



The year Finnick Odair won the Hunger Games, Johanna Mason was 11 years old and she had never been in a Reaping. At that time here had certainly been no blood on her hands. Only trees had felt the force of her deadly blows.

The first time she actually met Finnick Odair, was on her victory tour. And at that point there was more than a little blood on her hands that would never wash off.

 _Victory._ She didn't feel like winner. Winning implied the game was over. And she had already caught on to the fact that she had survived to become a piece in an even greater game.

Johanna had smiled her way trough her victory tour so far, her face feeling cracked like old bark from the effort. Her mentor had warned her about letting herself slip out of her role. She was Johanna Mason, the cunning and unfrgiving survivor who had tricked everyone. The Capitol needed its victors, but it did not want the truth to slip through the cracks. Trauma was for the rest of the year.

"Survival," she whispered. As the last living member of her family, she knew about survival and the guilt that came with it. 

Her mentor looked at her sharply and across the room of the Justice Building of District 4 the mayor was glaring at Finnick Odair like he wasn't happy with what he was seeing. She knew it was Finnick. She had heard his voice often enough in the broadcast, in the recordings of old games. From her vantage point Johanna couldn't see more than Finnick's back. He was wearing a pristine white shirt and short gray pants and that alone made him seem less like a victor, less like the polished charmer who'd dazzled and seduced the Capitol audience for years with every smile he threw at the camera.

Johanna recognized his stylist standing in the corner. She was also looking unhappy. Johanna had gotten the same unhappy expression from her own team of stylists when they'd gotten the first look at her back home. Their brilliant little star had devolved into a real life person again – and what use was that to them? "You look like a savage, darling," her chief stylist had said.

She'd bit her tongue not to say: "I _am_ a savage or I'd be dead."

A young woman, about Johanna's age was sitting in a comfortable chair to the left of the room, humming to herself, softly swaying back and forth, her eyes unseeing, her hair wild. 

Annie Cresta.

Johanna recognized her instantly.

Her hair was hanging over her shoulders in long strands, natural and untamed, nothing like the doll like creature she'd been last year when Johanna had seen her on the screens at home, surviving her Hunger Games because she could swim. 

That had been before Johanna's reaping. Before.

Finally, Johanna's mentor ushered her forward. They were not getting involved with the District 4 problems. They had to watch their own steps. "Keep your head high and smile," she told Johanna.

But Johanna couldn't stop staring at Annie. The girls hysteria had seemed so strange that year of her winning the games - until Johanna had been shown her game over and over again to learn from it. She'd learned.

How to look like easy prey.

Annie must be a much better person than herself. She was one of the few victors who hadn't gotten her hands dirty.

Johanna felt cold, felt nothing.

When they passed Finnick, he looked up. It _was_ Finnick Odair - no questions about it. But he looked _real_ ; his eyes were tired and a sad, hollow blue and his face was not the clean shaven, angelic visage she knew from countless hollow vids. Blonde, untidy stubble shadowed his sun burned jaw.

That was nothing like the sleek Finnick she knew.

Their eyes met as she passed.

"You're expected in the Capitol," the mayor reminded Finnick.

"I'm _home_ now," Finnick nearly spat, but the mayor threw a significant look in Annie's direction and suddenly his expression was filled with as much disgust as Finnick's.

And Johanna understood.

The game was never over.

* * *

Next time they met in the Capitol, both mentors of their District's newest tributes, mingling in the main building, waiting for other mentors to approach them to discuss alliances, or patrons to back up their new favorites.

Finnick's skin was still the golden-bronze of the healthy young man from the fishing district, but his face was clean-shaven and his eyes were even bluer with the glittering make-up that had been applied.

He was the handsome boy-man she'd expected that first time, but less real, less like a person.

His eyes were shining with the buzz of recent alcohol consumption.

It made sense.

By now she'd learned a lot about her new life, about the way she was as much a well paid pet as a commodity ushered on whatever whim a well paying patron uttered in the right places.

"No beard?" she asked.

His eyes narrowed, but then his face relaxed. "Golden boy Finnick Odair belongs here. The beard belongs home." His eyes were much darker in the light and his smile looked natural and so fake that she wanted to scratch it off his face with her too long, manicured fingernails.

Their carefully chosen clothes, their make-up and their perfectly styled hair just underlined the truth: They were not children of the Capitol. Standing here, carefully gauging each other were two killers, two survivors, two prisoners caught in the net of their victory.

The make-up their stylists had spent hours on barely hid the smoldering anger they were both keeping in.

"Poor Finnick," Gareth had said to her this morning when they'd passed him in the street. "He's popular."

She knew what that meant now.

"First year mentoring?" Finnick asked and sounded callous and uncaring, but he met her gaze head on like a challenge and she did not shy back from it.

"Any advice?"

He narrowed his eyes and then told her: "Don't get attached."

Laughter wrenched itself from his throat, like a flood that had been waiting to break free for hours; it was manic and painful and yet such a truly happy sound. 

Infectious.

Johanna laughed too, feeling some of the tension bleed away in the first real expression of feeling she'd allowed herself for a year.

Enobaria passed them and stared in their general direction for a moment, narrowing her eyes, perhaps wondering about the implications any alliance could have for the survival of her own brutish career volunteers. 

They laughed together for much longer than Johanna expected and then shared a drink, sitting down together on one of the plushy too soft seats in the foyer where they were expected to talk to Capitol patrons. 

_Don't get attached,_ Finnick had said. What he hadn't said was: _Because they might survive after all._

Later, when she was alone in her suite, both tributes in their own rooms and everyone else finally leaving her to herself, she took a pair of scissors and cut of her hair, whispering: "Fuck them." 

She was already looking forward to her stylists horrified reaction, when she would come to usher her to the big party tonight, where fat rich men would slide up to her and women with fake eyelashes and unattractive "enhancements" would grope her, never wanting anything but an equally fake smile from her.

Looking at the uneven hair that remained, she smiled.

"Fuck them all."

* * *

At home she wore the functional clothes her District favored; clothes that didn't hinder you when you went into the trees, that kept you warm in winter and protected you in summer. There was peace in functionality.

She cut her hair, shaved it off sometimes when she couldn't stand to look at her face in the mirror. 

Her stylists dealt with it in their own ways - giving her extensions or wigs or incorporating her shocking new hairstyle as an element. 

Every time people looked at her strangely at Capitol parties it was her own little victory. 

It was her shoving a little bit of reality into their fucking faces.

Like now. Her head was clean shaven like Finnick's face, building a terrible counterpoint to her voluptuous dress, but in her opinion just perfectly highlighting the naked skin that showed through the cleavage. Reality. She wasn't perfect and she wasn't really part of this.

When he caught sight of her, Finnick raised his glass in her direction and she toasted back.

Some parts of them had been bought and sold and would never again be their own. 

Some others could never be taken away.

They would never truly win this game, but as a victor it were the small victories you wrested from you oppressors every day right under their noses that counted most.


End file.
